October 28, 2009 (CAP Newswire) — Internet marketers, particularly but not limited to those specializing in search engine analytics, always have their eyes on Google and the changes it makes to its analytics functionality — the backbone of the industry, by almost any measure. (Especially in the SEO domain.)
Recently, the company announced a new set of features for its trademark Google Analytics offering in the U.S. The new roll-out is designed to build on “last year's enterprise-class feature launch,” the company explained on its site.
Briefly, the updates include:
- More data manipulation that can measure user engagement and branding success, with new thresholds for “Time on Site” and “Pages per Visit”;
- Expanded mobile reporting, to better track mobile sites and apps, one of the industry's fastest-growing segments;
- Advanced table filtering that significantly expands last year’s roll-out of more specific data analysis by location and keyword combinations;
- More unique visitor metrics to gauge specific cookies in user-defined segments;
- Multiple custom variables for defining and tracking visitors (such as member vs. non-member, logged-in or not, etc.);
- New sharing segments and custom report templates;
- And, the biggest change, "Analytics Intelligence", which provides "automatic alerts of significant changes in the data patterns of your site metrics and dimensions over daily, weekly and monthly periods."
As celebrated as these changes are — and they’ve received almost universal acclaim — many users are still pointing out the obvious blind spots in Google Analytics, such as the inability to view full IP addresses and to track those visitors who don’t use Javascript. Is there a specific reason why these areas are being ignored?
Google has also announced plans for a special search engine function for social media sites — something Bing also claims to be working on, and something many web marketers would love to have — but no specific plans have been made toward that end, as of yet.